Personal cleansing products have attempted to meet a variety of product characteristics desired by consumers. In general, a suitable cleansing product must exhibit good cleaning and lathering characteristics while still being mild to the skin. More beneficial are products which do not irritate the skin and leave the skin feeling moisturized.
One type of traditional moisturizing formulation includes oil and water emulsions. These formulations are created by emulsifying non-soluble skin conditioning oils into water based cleansing formulations. These formulations are balanced between the cleansing properties of the water phase and the softening effects of the oils deposited on the skin. Stability of these formulations is achieved by using an excess of surfactants present in the emulsion phase. However, emulsification of oils in water based cleansers negatively impacts the lathering and cleansing properties of the cleansers. High oil content often drastically reduces lathering ability of the product. Furthermore, surfactants, responsible for the cleansing effects, are often irritating to the skin. As such, increasing surfactant use so that more emollient oil can be incorporated into a particular composition may have no net benefit to the softening and/or cleansing characteristics of the bodywash.
Thus, there is a need to stably increase the amount of emollient oil in bodywash products without significantly impacting lather and cleansing properties while at the same time limiting skin irritation and increasing skin conditioning effects.